Bizarre Pixelation Occuring (Warlords)

[FullyCompletely]

I've been playing Warlords since it came out without any problems. This morning I load up my saved game, 1782AD, 7 civs standard map. After about 2 minutes, this bizarre pixelation starts appearing randomly and rapidly in dozens of spots all over the screen. They're rapidly shifting position and vary in size from very small to large splotches.

I've been playing the game all along with the same settings and no errors at all have occured. Graphics settings are set to their highest and have been for several weeks now. Drivers haven't been updated and no other changes have been made. Problem appeared suddenly this morning upon loading game.

I'm on an ATI aiw 9800 pro 128mb, 1GB of RAM.

Help

 

[FullyCompletely]

Update: Restarting the machine cleared up the problem. I had tried restarting the game alone prior to making the post, to no avail. Anyways, fixed.

 

[FullyCompletely]

The pixels from hell are back again and this time rebooting isn't doing anything. WTH! It's like fireflys are flying all over the screen.

 

[Talon500]

Get a screenie, and check the GFX card

 

[FullyCompletely]

I figured out the pixels were from other parts of the screen. I realized this when starting a new game and noticed black dots were appearing on the revealed areas of the map and little blips of green (grass) and blue (sea) appearing in the black, hidden areas. If it occurs again I'll try to get a screen-shot, but it's the kind of thing difficult to get a picture of.

*UPDATE*: I did a through cleaning of the inside of my computer, particularly the fans. A nauseating amount of dust came out. Everything has been beautiful since. I'm pretty confident at this point to declare this was a problem with the video card due to severe build-up of dust in the cooling fan.